Features

Introduction

The global spread of political Islam - or, Islamism - is a complex, nuanced, and fluid phenomenon with critical implications for the durability of international human rights architectures premised on universal norms; for state sovereignty; and for peace, order, and the rule of law. There is ample evidence to suggest the detrimental effects for democracy, economic justice, and security caused by ideas and actors operating under the rubric of Islamism, shorthanded to mean the global spread of sharia law. The Global Political Islam section will provide timely information, updates, and analysis around four focus areas associated with the globalization of Islamism.

Global Political Islam

July 11, 2014

The struggle between Turkey's competing Islamist factions – the government's Justice and Development Party and the international Gulenist network – are producing continuing chaos in the country's political and social institutions, given wholesale purges of the police, judiciary, and media in Turkey.

July 11, 2014

Boko Haram's campaign to use violence to bring about a sharia state in Nigeria has morphed from a homegrown terror movement into a regional problem creating refugee flows, human trafficking of women, and girls kidnapped by the Islamist terror group.

July 11, 2014

The leadership of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (“OIC”) is moving actively to position the global Islamic organization as a forum for rapprochement between Sunni powerhouse Saudi Arabia and Shiite leader Iran.

July 11, 2014

Iraq continues its slide into territorial disintegration and social anarchy, as Sunni militants led by the jihadi group Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant seized control from Baghdad over the Iraq's strategic area of Mosul and the Nineveh Province.

July 11, 2014

The Pakistani Taliban's audacious weekend assault on the country's Karachi airport is a warning of the adaptability and dynamism of globalized Islamist extremist networks fanning outward from core hubs in Southwest and Central Asia.